The Gentle Path to Fulfillment

Coaching from the Inside Out

Being happy is an inside job – there is nothing to do. And I would like to illustrate this with a metaphor.

Gaining an understanding the inside out nature of the human experience is a little like eating an artichoke. One by one you pull off all the outer leaves, some of them are sweet and tender, some of them are tough and bitter but as you keep getting closer to the centre it becomes easier and easier to pull the leaves off. Then you get to the middle and around the artichoke heart, there is that hairy bit, and this bit is hard to take off, you have to pull at it and parts of it don’t want to give, parts of it don’t want to let go. So we have two choices we can either give up and leave the horrid hairy bit but that would mean that we would never uncover the true heart of the artichoke or we can see it for what it is, just a hairy bit and that once they’re gone all that will be left will be the soft creamy core, as long as we allow ourselves to uncover it.

As your understanding deepens, each time you pull off a leaf, i.e. recognize your thinking, you gain deeper insight into your experience of life. As your understanding deepens, so your level of consciousness rises. When we get to the hairy bit, we realize that we have deep ingrained beliefs about ourselves; some of these are difficult to let go of but the further we pursue the Transformative Conversation, the more we are able to see that these beliefs, positive and negative, are also nothing but product of our own thinking.

When we succeed finally in shedding all our leaves… and the hairy bit, when we become aware that our thinking is nothing more than just our thinking, we are left with that soft creamy core of our being, a core of innate well being, resilience and resourcefulness. Our Minds quieten and we live more in a sense of peace with greater access to an infinite source of Wisdom and Creativity.

Our thoughts are still there but, as with the artichoke leaves when we pull them off, the thoughts are no longer attached to who we are and we are no longer attached to them. We can look at them far more objectively and we become aware that we don’t have to take what we are thinking quite so seriously any more.

We achieve the possibility of being able to think whatever we choose to think and most important of all; whatever our life-circumstances happen to be, we have a far more gentle and far more pleasant experience of them.

If you would like to read about how this understanding has been transformative in my own life, you can do so by following this link: